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title OSMOOC 5.3
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Module 5: Open Research Software and Open Source, part 2

Table of Contents

Collaborating and contributing through Open Source

Often, OSS is developed in a public, decentralised, collaborative manner between multiple contributors. The purpose of this is to enhance the diversity and scope of a project and its design, in order to become more beneficial and sustainable. Such an approach was famously likened to a 'bazaar' model by Eric Raymond, an early OSS proponent. One of the major guiding principles of this is that of peer production, which relies on self-organised communities to regulate the development of content, co-ordinated towards a shared goal or outcome.

OSS projects rely heavily on volunteer collaboration, which often entails a constant flux of newcomers in order to become productive and sustainable (Steinmacher et al., 2014). Creating the right social atmosphere for a project, and a welcoming engagement environment, are often critical to successful collaboraitons in OSS.


Where to go from here

Hopefully now you have come to see the importance of software as a cornerstone of modern science, and the importance that OSS plays in this.

The learning outcomes from this should be:

  1. You will now be able to define the characteristics of OSS, and some of the ethical, legal, economic and research impact arguments for and against it.

  2. Based on community standards, you will now be able to describe the quality requirements of sharing and re-using open code.

  3. You will now be able to use a range of research tools that utilise OSS.

  4. You will now be able to transform code designed for their personal use into code that is accessible and re-usable by others.

  5. Software developers will be able to make their software citable, and software users will know how to cite the software they use.


BONUS TASK

Task 3 (also available on github) will take you a step deeper into integrating Git into a typical research workflow by showing you how to integrate it with RStudio. It is recommended that you have completed the first 2 tasks before proceeding with this one.